California’s catastrophic wildfires in 2020 put twice as much greenhouse gas emissions into the air as the state’s reductions in those same gases over nearly 20 years – erasing gains going back to 2003, according to a new study.
It’s part of a positive feedback loop that’s very negative, say the researchers.
“Climate change is creating conditions conducive to larger wildfires. And the wildfires are adding to the greenhouse gases that cause climate change,” said lead author Michael Jerrett, a professor in the Department of Environmental Health Sciences at the University of California, Los Angeles.
The historic megafires of 2020 released an estimated 127 million metric tons of carbon dioxide into the air. That compares to the 65 million metric tons of greenhouse gas emissions California was able to reduce between 2003 and 2019, the study, published in this month’s edition of the journal Environmental Pollution, showed.
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Such feedback loops, including burning forests and melting permafrost, “have the potential to wipe out a lot of our modest, short-term gains,” said LeRoy Westerling, a climate and wildfire scientist at the University of California, Irvine who was not involved in the paper.
Scientists are increasingly realizing greenhouse gases produced by wildfires are a major problem when it comes to climate change.
In the 2020 fire year, which had the most megafires in California history, 15 times the annual average emissions between 1984 and 2015, according to a study Westerling worked on, published earlier this year in the journal Environmental Research.
The problem is not limited to California, he said. Massive fires have been a growing problem across the West for years. A wildfire burning near the Oregon-Washington border on Tuesday, for example, prompted thousands of evacuation orders.
In a double blow, in some cases the forests that burn are dedicated to carbon offset programs. Oregon’s monster Bootleg Fire in 2021 burned for six weeks, wiping out an estimated 24% of a huge carbon offset project used by Microsoft and others, according to Carbon Plan, a nonprofit that maps the overlap of the fires and forest projects.
Greenhouse gases produced by wildfires are not ‘carbon neutral’
In 2020, wildfires were the second-largest producer of greenhouse gases in California, surpassed only by cars and other vehicles. Despite that, greenhouse gases produced by wildfires aren’t factored into state or federal emission numbers.
That’s because forest fires have always been considered natural disasters humans had no control over, and because historically forests regrow and eventually recapture all the carbon dioxide released when the trees burned.
In the modern world, when the amount of carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is now more than 50% higher than pre-industrial times, those assumptions no longer apply.
“We can’t continue to treat these emissions as if they were carbon neutral, because they’re not,” said Jerrett. “The atmosphere doesn’t care where the carbon comes from. It’s going to have the same warming potential either way.”
Forests can take between 50 to several hundred years to grow back. That’s time the Earth doesn’t have as nations scramble to lower their carbon dioxide emissions and keep temperatures from rising more than 1.5 degrees Celsius.
In some cases, forests may not grow back at all. A warmer, drier climate means that in some areas, what comes back is closer to range land or chaparral than the towering forests that once stood there.
This makes dealing with wildfires a much bigger part of dealing with climate change than previously believed, said Jerrett.
“Because they’re not accounted for in the same way we account for emissions from power plants or automobiles, the tendency has been to underinvest in stopping these fires,” he said.
The ideal would be to stop them before they start by spending more money on controlled burns and forest management to keep small fires from becoming intense megafires, he said.
Climate change threatens to intensify wildfires in California and the West
A trifecta of problems caused by people mean wildfires in the American West are only going to get bigger and more intense, say researchers.
The first is climate change, which is bringing more heat and drought to the West and making forests more likely to burn.
In addition, more houses are being built in wilderness and near-wilderness areas, making human-sparked fires more common.
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Finally, more than a century of policies aimed at stopping all wildfires means the natural fast, light burns that clear undergrowth and make forests less likely to explode have been suppressed, leading to extreme fuel buildups when fires do start.
All of these mean paying attention to how much greenhouse gases are released from wildfires is critical, said Jerrett.
It’s also a stark warning, said Westerling.
“We shouldn’t think we can just pull a Hail Mary at the end and somehow in the last minute fix things, he said. “We’re triggering processes that we can’t easily unwind which can swamp things we’re putting into place.”
This isn’t an argument for doing nothing, he said. “It’s an argument for acting fast.”